The best things in life are three.

I think last weekend might have been the greatest weekend of sport in my life:

1. WHAM - Come on you Swans

First up, the Swans drew 1-1 against Fulham in the FA Cup 5th round. Even though we deserved to win, the benefit of that result is that some American Mints will be able to come cheer on the Super Swans on the eve of the WebApp weekender.

2. BAM - Land of my fathers

Then in the evening, Wales defeated England in the rugby. I’m gutted that I couldn’t attend (thanks to Wil Stephens and Huw Eurig Davies for offering me a ticket) due to the knee surgery I had last week but I enjoyed watching the match from my sofa with my Mum running around getting me beers and snacks the whole time.

3. THANK YOU MAM - Football3s

Sandwiched between the football and rugby was the first ever live game of Football3s (we played along to Portsmouth vs Man City). Football3s didn't work from my house but I understand the other Mints had a whale of a time. I am sure that we'll fix the bugs and get the game running smoothly ahead of our Football3s launch party on Monday 23rd. After that we'll be inviting people round to play along to most evening premiership matches. Sign up here if you'd like an invite.

Here's the presentation that we were going to give at Mashup last Thursday... before we realised we only had 60 seconds and weren't allowed slides.

Osama bin Everywhere is a cross-platform documentary we produced last year.

It aired for the second time last week. For some unknown reason, we got far more feedback this time.

Here are some comments:

"I am a Catholic and father to 6 children. Having just watched Osama bin Everywhere, I feel this programme should be shown to every child in every school in the UK regardless of religious belief. How refreshing it was to watch. This young women deserves public recognition and a national award. The comments made and feelings expressed by all the Osamas were a true insight to Muslim people and the meaning of their religion. The programme should be shown in a primetime slot to maximise the effect of its message. Bad people are bad people, they don't need to blame their religious beliefs. We all know who they are in our respective communities. Congratulations to all involved. Thank you again."

"Not really a press enquiry but please pass my congratulations onto Farrah - I taught her at school in the 1990s. Watched today's Channel 4 programme whilst at home recovering from surgery. Very, very proud of what she's become - but not at all surprised!"

Hemlock is Mint's toolkit for building Flash applications that support real-time many-to-many interaction. Hemlock is open source. We hope to release it mid-February.

Thursday's mashup* event is about the 'Realtime Social Web'. We will be demoing two Hemlock applications there to show the type of application it inspires.

The Great British Sandwich is now a day old. It contains well over a 1,000 layers. Right now, it's as tall as a Routemaster bus. Another 3,000 layers and it will be as tall as The Angel of the North.

Tom Phillips at Metro says, "This is basically what Tim Berners-Lee was thinking of when he created the web."

Good work Phil, tech lead, and Utku, chief sandwich spreader.

I'm not sure what to make of all the silliness. Billy at Cowfish points out:

The fillings vary from the vaguely intelligent (the white text on white backgrounded Air especially appealing to my website abusing nature) to the predictable (Only one Pork Sword but more Marmites than Vegemites) to the slightly surreal (featuring Fire and a Meta-Sandwich).

We had expected the sandwich to be filled with food. Saying that, I love the way people do unexpected things on the web.

Follow gbsandwich on Twitter

(Thanks to John Pollock for inadvertently suggesting the headline.)

We are hiring someone to help us grow a community around our forthcoming game, Football3s. (This position has now been filled)

I've recently discovered e-mint. It is a Yahoo! Group that discusses how to run online communities.

They are a friendly bunch, as shown by the warm welcome I received from Tamara Littleton of eModeration:

"We worked with a Mint Digital application on a very successful social network for ABC Family over at Disney [Virtual Rush], we love you guys :)

Not everyone puts as much care into the moderation tools. They're often an afterthought so it was good to work with people who thought about how moderators would use the tools."

It's reassuring to see that e-mint possesses the very features of online friendliness that it exists to promote.

Mint is working on a new project. It's about wisdom. I can't say much more than that right now.

Today, I stumbled across a new book. Wisdom. It is "inspired by the idea that wisdom is the greatest gift one generation can give to another."

Andrew Zuckerman, the author, says:

"My whole life I've looked up to older people. It just seemed logical to me that these are the people that have done it. They've got all the secrets. Why wouldn't you ask them?"

Thanks Andrew. You've created a wonderful piece of work. Mint is inspired.

At Doc/Fest on Saturday, Lunchtime Loveboat won the Crossover Labs pitching competition. This award is considered the America's Cup of interactivity.

Lunchtime Loveboat combines the flirty dating of a site like I'm in Like With You with the reality energy of a show like The Salon.

After learning that this year's New York Future of Web Design Conference would land on election day and be situated right next to Times Square, I expected a rather exciting and inspirational atmosphere.

My personal highlights were...

On the 15th October, Mint was confronted with its 10,000th case in FogBugz, an imposing visual landmark of four consecutive zeros across our computer screens. An outsider’s reaction might be that Mint has made a lot of mistakes in the last couple of years. Surely 10,000 bugs in roughly two years for a company the size of Mint Digital must be a bad thing, no?

At Mint, the 10,000th bug is not only a positive milestone, but also a time for reflection on our development process, our accumulation of collective expertise, our desire to involve all team members in all projects. Instead of a liability, it represents on one hand the accomplishment of the volume and diversity of Mint’s work. Perhaps most importantly, bug 10,000 captures the dogged commitment to a process that has provided a practical foundation for Mint’s core values.

Mint Digital has recently completed the development work on Thumbplay OPEN, a self-serve way for independent content owners to upload, manage and sell mobile content to over 230 million mobile customers. It’s cool from the consumers' perspective, but it’s also cool under the hood. We thought it might be worth sharing a little bit of how it works.

Thumbplay OPEN serves two communities. Independent music and visual artists can make money by packaging and selling their work to millions of mobile customers. Site owners can sell mobile downloads from any Web site, application or widget.

From Mint's perspective Ruby on Rails, and RESTful design have proved to be a great combination when integrating with existing systems.

When Ned Canty from NYTVF approached Mint about hosting an event, he was keen to avoid the typical panel format. He wanted something that focused on the creative challenges of producing cross-platform entertainment.

Inspired by Wikinomics, I thought I'd try an open source approach to the ideas development process.

Creativity Live was a mass-participation brainstorm between three sharp digital minds (Ian Schafer from Deep Focus, Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination and Tom Ajello from Poke NY) and 150 audience members.

I think you will find that the best things in life have the word 'pop' associated with them.

Five examples:

1. Top of the Pops – the best TV music show ever;
2. Pop Tarts – a great breakfast although allegedly dangerous to eat fresh out the toaster (hmm doesn’t this apply to ANY food that’s really hot? Wait for it to cool, problem solved!);
3. Cheggars plays Pop – as a child I went to the live show in Swansea;
4. Pop – e.g. cherryade;
5. The Body Pop – one of the most entertaining dances there is.

Channel 4 just launched Sexperience (commissioned by Adam Gee). Yesterday 463,744 pages were viewed. Each visitor viewed 10.5 pages on average, indicating a high level of engagement.

The backbone of the site is over 350 videos, featuring multiple answers to questions like When were you sure of your sexual identity? or Have you ever slept with more than one person at the same time?

Mint Digital is delighted to be a new media sponsor at this year's New York Television Festival. As part of their Digital Day, we will be hosting a panel called Creativity Live on Tues 16th September at 2:30pm.

Creativity Live is a mass-participation brainstorm that brings together the sharpest and most creative minds in digital media. Three panellists, one moderator and a 150-strong audience will be given just one hour to develop three cross-platform entertainment ideas. After the event people will be able to go to the NYTVF website, where they can vote on the ideas they would like to see taken forward.

If you fancy joining us, RSVP to toby@mintdigital.com. Alternatively, quote "telly2008" to receive a 20% discount to the full festival.

Last weekend’s Edinburgh International Television Festival will have to go down as one of Menthol TV’s finest hours yet.

It’s hard to know where to begin. I could start by telling you about the captivating speech given by Clay Shirky on post Gutenberg Economics and what this spells for TV in the 21st Century. Or Peter Bazalgette’s theory on how the credit crunch will accelerate US-driven consolidation in the industry. Or what about how MENTHOL TV BLEW THE ROOF OFF THE PLACE with a devastating pitch by chief Mayhem Maker and dragon slayer Mona Yousefi!

Having been selected to take part in a special festival edition of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den, Mona had five minutes to impress four real-life commissioning editors with her Mayhem Makers pitch. Within seconds Mona had the dragons and the audience on the edge of their seats. Regaling the auditorium with tales of Mayhem Makers’ sell-out West End screenings and the story behind the show, the knockout blow came when she played the promo.

The crowd went mad and the dragons were speechless, except for Heather Jones, MTV’s Executive Vice President, Content & Creative Director of Television who said.

"It was worth coming to Edinburgh just to see this."

Thanks to Mona’s outstanding pitch, we won the competition but what was most exciting was the response from the 250 TV types in the room. They loved it! Mayhem Makers was the people’s choice.

Another Mint / Menthol TV project that was making noise at the festival was Osama Loves.  Cover star of Future Media, Osama the Nigerian Tailor and his love for chickens was everywhere. Watch this space on news about the documentary due to air later this month.

Last month was 2gether08. The stand-out speaker was Russell Davies who gave a wonderfully counter-intuitive talk on how being clear often runs counter to being interesting.

Also Julian Baggini was great talking about his Welcome to Everytown experience. At a technology conference, it is easy to forget how important locality is to most people. Two thirds of Britains live within five miles of where they were born.

Mint was proud to premiere Web 2.0: The Musical. It looks like we'll perform this nonsense again. Watch this space.

Also, I made a speech on How to be Generous. Here's the Guardian's take on it.

On Monday, we launched the unsignedAct website, part of a cross-media campaign to find the best unsigned musical talent in the UK.

The project is BIG. It spans web, WAP, print, TV and live music events. It is sponsored by Orange, broadcast by Channel 4 and enabled by Sony Ericsson. Universal Music provides the prize (a record deal).

IRIS, Princess, Airmotion and Mint are turning the whole thing into a reality. IRIS have done a splendid job on the branding and visual identity (the logo has been built from custom-made flight cases). Princess is producing the TV show. Airmotion is making the WAP site. And Mint? Well, our handsome team refined the site concept, designed the user experience and built a rock-solid piece of software.

Acts enter the competition by making a demo CD. Each demo CD can be customised with artwork and contains up to three tracks. It's intended to be a little gem, showcasing the best of each band's creativity.

Fans add their favourite tracks to a personal mixtape. Mixtapes can be customised and shared with friends (check my selection, below).

It's been 48 hours since launch. Over 1,000 bands and solo artists have entered. Princess were hoping for 3,000 acts to enter in three weeks, so it is a promising start.

Have fun!

Today, on August 1, 2008, both the UK and US offices of Mint Digital internationally celebrated the first Ron DeVera day. Simply put, Ron was the first employee hired by Mint Digital to sport a mustache. Since his arrival at Mint, he has ascended to near legendary status through his relentless work ethic, peerless HTML/CSS/JS skills, and his total domination in all company award categories. All these traits are personified by the tasteful choice of facial hair that has endeared Ron to Mint.

In the quest for the secret to the DeVera mojo, Mint Digital requested that all employees cultivate what is known simply as "the look". All the entries have been digitally documented and uploaded to Mint Digital's photo challenge site which was developed at this year's WebApp Weekender. Anecdotally, Mint has found that the mustaches have improved the collective morale, increased individual productivity, flattened the learning curves for difficult technologies, enhanced creative output both qualitatively and quantitatively, and have provided numerous unspoken benefits outside of the office as well.

Personally, I must say that I was confronted with aesthetic choices of uncommon weight and subtlety. When I fashioned my mustache early this morning, there was a temptation to be outlandish, a seduction towards the theatre of the garish.

However, I reflected and stopped myself immediately. This was no banal mustache-growing competition one might find in some underfunded regional circus.

This was Ron DeVera's day.